Previews

Athens 2004

A little old. A little new. Sony's take on the Olympics will give gamers more than two dozen ways to go for the gold this summer.

Spiffy:

Fun and varied roster of events; great party game.

Iffy:

No online play; some of the events rather complicated.

The athletes are putting the finishing touches on their training. The builders are in the final stages of stadium construction. And the governing bodies are polishing the empty urine cups at the drug-testing facility. It can only mean one thing -- the Olympics are almost here. For this year's games, Sony snapped up the official rights to the Olympiad, and as a result, unless you're holding a dual shock in your hand, you won't be able to go for the gold in 989 Sports' Athens 2004. Developed by Eurocom and set for a July release, the game looks to give gamers the chance to "play along at home" while the world's elite athletes compete for real in Greece.

There haven't been too many track & field titles for console gamers of late. Other than Konami's ESPN International Track & Field 2000 release, the PS2 crowd hasn't been able to hack away at a former staple of the gaming world. If you're an old-school gamer, though, you'll get an immediate nostalgic jolt when you fire up Athens. If your formative years were spent continuously banging on two buttons in the track & field games of yore, you'll be able to step right up to the starting line and represent your country.

Just like you remember, most of the track events are of the "press two buttons forever"-style of play. Thankfully, though, Athens boasts a full roster of events -- including a bunch that'll let you give your tortured digits somewhat of a break. The game is hoping to deliver a complete Olympic experience, so when you're not sprinting and dashing, you'll be throwing things like shot puts and javelins, taking part in gymnastic events, and even hopping on a horse and jumping over stuff. (Am I the only one who didn't know that equestrian events were part of the Olympics? And do both the horse and the rider have to be from the country they're representing?)

Hey, watch where you're pointing that thing!

Each event has a different way to play, which has its plusses and minuses. On the positive side, it adds somewhat to the variety, as you're faced with a new learning curve every time you start a new event. Even similar events like the shot put, discus, and javelin throw are handled differently enough so that mastering one doesn't mean you'll be able to go deep with the other. Some of the control schemes will remind you of old faves -- the women's gymnastics is a DDR-based deal, for example -- but some are new and will challenge you.

The potential downside is that with so many different control schemes, some events may end up being unnecessarily harder than other events. Admittedly, there's still a good amount of tweaking to be done, but I couldn't hit anything but air in the skeet shooting event and the weightlifting and swimming events seemed overly complicated and frustrating.

You can take on the world in either the stricter competition mode -- where you take part in a set number of events over a given number of days -- or you can take it a bit easier in the arcade mode. The arcade mode is a little less formal and more forgiving. And it's here -- with a number of multiplayer modes -- that Athens comes across as a potentially killer party game. Up to four players can bang away in any of the game's events. The sheer number of different games and the relative simplicity of some of them means that novice gamers will be able to hold their own against more experienced button-pushers. Maxing out the fun should be the appropriately named party mode -- designed to be used with a dance pad.